100 Waifus Changelog:

The moral center of my book comes in Chapter 44, where I first lay out Christopher's moral priorities, and then compare them to the moral priorities of the present day Earth.  It's a tour de force of writing that sums everything up.

Therefore it was important to get it to sound as pithy and convincing as possible, so I edited it a bit to take out the parts that weren't working and add in parts that would.  The newly edited section now reads as such:

       Actually, I bet I could attach a single word to each commandment to typify my statements in their most primordial form. To stress what virtue I was aiming for each time. Let's see if I could do that:

1. Respect for truth

2. Respect for persons

3. Respect for property

4. Respect for feelings

5. Respect for family

6. Respect for reason

7. Respect for beauty

8. Respect for love

9. Respect for discipline

10. Respect for justice

　　If these ten things were properly respected life would be good. If they weren't it would be evil. It was that simple. Rather than lawyers and judges poring over tens of thousands of pages of laws, these ten commandments could cover everything necessary. Even more amazingly, good and evil was so simple, the lawbook of Eden was so pellucid, all ten commandments could be boiled down to single words.

　　Yes, the ten commandments required additional interpretation and filling in of glossed over details, but it was obvious to any rational adult what I was getting at. There could be no confusion like what happened with the terribly written U.S. constitution.

　　My report on why the world ended, conducted after an investigation with Nayuki, was quite simple. People hadn't followed the ten commandments, so there was no sanctity of truth, sanctity of persons, sanctity of property, sanctity of feelings, sanctity of family, sanctity of reason, sanctity of beauty, sanctity of love, sanctity of discipline, or sanctity of justice left in the world. Since none of these things were honored, defended or upheld, they were all tossed aside whenever convenient in favor of the things that were honored and upheld. And what demonic priorities they were: Self-esteem, hedonism, consent, hard work, tolerance, diversity, equality, superstition, democracy and non-discrimination, the ten anti-commandments of the Anti-Christ. These Riders of the Apocalypse were deemed to trump the things that actually mattered, so over time the bulwarks that sustained and continued life naturally eroded. Like a dam no longer receiving maintenance it was only a matter of time until the whole system collapsed. There were no functional mores left to preserve life on Earth -- they had all been sacrificed on the altars of these strange new gods.

　　I bet if I tried I could pair an inverse anti-commandment the Earth had been following to every single one of my commandments, proving the Earth had actually managed to so far separate itself from morality that it no longer possessed a single worthwhile trait. This was actually intriguing. If I wrote up Earth's ten commandments, would they actually manage to annul everything of worth in this world?

1. Thou shalt not imperil people's superstition, regardless of what erroneous beliefs are necessary to promote it.

Or, in other words, respect for anti-truth.

2. Thou shalt show tolerance towards any amount of criminal wrongdoing.

Or, in other words, respect for anti-persons.

3. Thou shalt serve equality by redistributing however much socio-economic status it takes from those who earned it to those still lacking.

Or, in other words, respect for anti-property.

4. Diversity is our greatest strength, therefore it is okay to defame, bully and harass historic homogeneous majorities until they've received it good and hard.

Or, in other words, respect for anti-feelings.

5. When it comes to sex and reproduction, do whatever feels good, and look not to tomorrow. In the end only consent matters.

Or, in other words, respect for anti-family.

6. When it comes to drugs, do whatever feels good, and look not to tomorrow. In the end only hedonism matters.

Or, in other words, respect for anti-reason.

7. In order to preserve everyone's self-esteem, no standards of personal behavior or appearance can be upheld.

Or, in other words, respect for anti-beauty.

8. Thou shalt work hard for as much of every day as possible, even if your work is unproductive or counterproductive, even if there are many other and better things one could be doing, and even if there's already plenty to go around. Hard work is an end in itself. Children must be the hardest worked of all.

Or, in other words, respect for anti-love.

9. Universal democracy, or in other words, one malicious, uninformed, idiotic voter, one vote, is the ideal way to run a country -- that's why we do the same for the heads of classrooms, military units, companies, and all other fields of endeavor. Oh wait, that's not how we do it? Oh well, either way.

Or, in other words, respect for anti-discipline.

10. Thou shalt not discriminate. Non-discrimination is more important than any regulation of negative behavior or any assignation of rewards or resources corresponding to people's merits.

Or, in other words, respect for anti-justice.

　　This toxic grab-bag of conservatism (superstition and hard work), liberalism (tolerance, equality, self-esteem, non-discrimination, diversity and democracy), and libertarianism (consent and hedonism), even though it was inchoate and contradictory within itself, was remarkably consistent in that it managed to reject and resist every single value necessary to the preservation of civilization. It was consistent only in that it preferred evil over good every single time. Like clockwork, it could be counted upon that everything of value was trumped by some cockamamie dross.

　　You could not have both superstition and truth.

　　You could not have both tolerance and security.

　　You could not have both equality and property.

　　You could not have both diversity and tranquility.

　　You could not have both consent and family formation.

　　You could not have both hedonism and rationality.

　　You could not have both self-esteem and standards.

　　You could not have both hard work and freedom.

　　You could not have both democracy and civilization.

　　You could not have both non-discrimination and justice.

* * *

Of course, the chapter has plenty of important stuff to say before and after this section, but this is the edited section in case people have already read the book and don't want to try to fish through the entire story in order to get to the few changes.

In addition, I corrected some children's names.  Instead of being named after the last name of the fictional character, they're now named after the first names of said character.  Generally I prefer first names unless there's a specific good reason to go with the last.  Asahina changed to Mikuru, Atobe to Keigo, Miyafuji to Yoshika and Francesca to Lucchini.  With this, the story reads just that little bit more euphoniously than before.

There were also some corrected comma and spelling errors, like usual.

I'm reading through the book for an 8th time in order to catch small ways to improve the story like this, and it's working like a charm.  If I'm willing to read a book 8 times in 5 months, everyone else should be able to at least read it once in their life.  Therefore, everyone should hurry up and read the full book, not only this small cut-out, and then praise me for how good it is after they're done.  Why hasn't anyone done this yet?  What's wrong with you people?